“…unless you become like
children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” -
Matthew 18:3 ESV
Becoming
like a child is an abstract idea that typically ends up being translated in
whatever form the message recipient deems comfortable. The fact is a person’s
childhood can be so riddled with pain that returning to those memories is not
something they will ever do on their own. What often ends up happening is that
a person takes the offer of a clean slate to mean that their childhood can be
buried with the dead. They start over as though they were like children again.
This
proves to be futile because adult cognition is shaped by environmental factors
that they, now, refuse to acknowledge. Why does the woman have an affair? Why
is the teenager promiscuous? Why does that man turn to pornography? The
unthinking religious answer would be that they are not disciplined enough;
people are living in defeat because they cannot get themselves under control.
Self-mutilation in the form of religious discipline, self-contempt, and
debasement are prevalent among the lives of the broken within the Christian
community. If their flaws are evident to others, they are deemed “less than”,
at best, or cast out, at worst.
Remove
religious expectation and you may get to the bottom of the behavior. She had an
affair because she was not loved enough as a child. The teen is promiscuous
because she had to make sex mean nothing in order to survive her sexual abuse.
He turns to pornography because his eyes were opened to graphic sexual images
as a child. Children do not possess the tools to survive the loss of innocence,
so they craft their own. These tools are there to help them regain control, to
no longer be victimized, and to save themselves. These children grow up to
become adults and, if they do not acknowledge their damage and receive the
proper counseling, they are still living their life with the survival tools
crafted by a child’s hands.
So,
where does sin fit in to the life of a Christian? It’s the left behind child
reaching out from the grave and begging to be redeemed. Forgiveness is not for
the person you think God wants you to be. It’s for the person you are. Life
events mold us into the people we are. If they are buried in shame, even under
a blanket embroidered with a message of “redemption”, they still end up
resurfacing in the form of dysfunction. God cares more about the person than He
does about their sin. It’s about the root of brokenness within the buried and
covered. He allows the natural life to
produce the natural outcomes of internal brokenness, not to crush them when
they find out they are flawed, but to show them where healing needs to take
place. Maybe, if we can see the dysfunction as a window into the broken places,
we stand on the side of Jesus, the Healer, instead of on the side of Satan, the
“accuser.” If we get in through the open window, we can sit with them where
they are. If we shame them, they’ll just board up the window and remain in a
lightless room of suffering.
My
sister was sexually tortured as a child. The damage to her sense of self-worth,
judgment, and sexuality remain. When she was five years old, she was brutally
raped while our brother got to play outside. As a child, she had the conscious
thought that if she were a boy, this wouldn’t be happening to her. She has
grown into an adult who feels more comfortable in a sexual relationship with a
woman. She, as a believer, knows how God views homosexuality and it devastates
her. She enrolled in a Christian college and sought the help of a school
counselor. However, when her sexual orientation was made public, she was kicked
out of school and unwelcome in her church community. She now believes that God
could not love her because she cannot make herself well. The adult in her wants
to have a relationship with God and the child within her wants someone to come
and save her. The belief that God will not walk with the damaged has been so
engrained into her, that she finds ways to silence the burning call in her
spirit just so she can survive. The things she uses to silence her pain look
like sin, too.
Would
you look at a child who is acting out and throw him out, or would you look at
the source of his behavior and try to reshape the mutilation that his life has
caused? When you’re dealing with an adult, you are really dealing with the
child within him. God calls us ‘Dear Children.” He sees children when He looks
at us. We are children who are still becoming.
There is so much more to the way God deals with us than behavior modification.
You don’t need a Redeemer in order to modify behavior. Anyone can do that.
God uses
our failures to illuminate our broken places. It’s a time to be glad that He is
merciful enough to allow our moral poverty to show us where to start looking
for the root. The loss of innocence has always been the root of sin. God is
interested in finding the child and restoring their innocence so they can
become like children again. We are to become like children in innocence as our
history makes cognitive maturity possible. God never asks us to find a way to
repress the things that make us imperfect. He asks us to trust Him as He brings
us through a process of redeeming and sanctifying the monsters we’re too afraid
to face alone.
Brothers, do not be children in
your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. - 1 Corinthians 14:20 ESV
Serena
Woods
Author,
Speaker, and Blogger
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